


I don't wanna die - until I live

by Frenchibi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Personal Growth, personal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 19:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14003040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frenchibi/pseuds/Frenchibi
Summary: About growth, and a girl who will always be restless.





	I don't wanna die - until I live

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astersandstuffs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astersandstuffs/gifts), [greenstickynotes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenstickynotes/gifts), [hajiiwa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hajiiwa/gifts), [joanofarcticmonkeys](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joanofarcticmonkeys/gifts), [notInvidia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notInvidia/gifts), [Z_ee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Z_ee/gifts).



> For the people who remind me that I want to keep growing - the people that don't feel temporary.
> 
> [Title from here.](https://open.spotify.com/track/0rQDAm42zmL10iTmeQb1Hm?si=pKMDVRLeQn2PqeJsTDQXXg)

She's been biding her time.

Sometimes she feels like that's her entire life. Waiting, somehow, beneath everything she did, everything she achieved or became.

Not for anyone in particular. Just for something that could sweep her off her feet. Something bigger than the world she knows.

Her world is comfortable. She's always in contact with family, with friends, with people who love her, who cherish her. She's always got places to be, people to meet, things to do.

She fills her time.

But sometimes, it's suffocating. This whole life she's built for herself over the years - its intricacies, its truths, its reality - has taken to feeling like a weight that someone carelessly left on her chest, and no one person is strong enough to lift.

She has days that feel like swallowing lead, days that feel like wading through concrete as it dries. Days that feel like she's Atlas with the sky on her shoulders, holding it up so people may look at the stars she loses herself in so often.

That's the strength she has - to show people the world. But she can't show herself, break herself free - she doesn't have that power. Or maybe she did, but it's tied down by the looming presence in her life of The Depression, spreading across every inch of her like ink seeping into cloth, growing like a disease of sticky tar inside her brain.

There are moments of clarity. Moments when she feels like she's climbed the world's highest mountain and is staring down at multitudes below, ready to leap and become one with the atmosphere. Moments she feels like she's flying - and moments she feels like she can finally rest.

They usually don't last.

She's been holding on to the people, the places, the things that make her feel safe - but nothing feels permanent. She's learned to enjoy temporary things, to make them work for her, to string herself along from one small source of peace to the next, not lastly by medicine and therapy. And it helps. It works. But she will never stop searching for something permanent, because everything she's tried has worn off eventually.

Art helped - creating, be it painting or writing or decorating her life, draping herself in memories, covered in stories and worlds to explore. Visiting galleries of paintings hung in fancy halls, and pages of art scrolled through on a tiny screen. Prints and originals to grace her own walls, gifts and creations to soothe her searching mind. Stickers and post cards to report back from faraway dreams.

Singing brought freedom and reprieve. The feeling of words taking on meaning when sung, when breathed to life. Lyrics woven into truths she could identify with, understanding through the strike of a key or a chord. Moods lifted and peace granted by violins and guitars, by the strum of a bass or the thump of a drum, by chanting alone or in unison. Compositions to broaden her own horizon, and to bring her a semblance of rest, and a feeling that there are always new things to discover - a world that's waiting.

And these days it's books. Her collection has always been extensive, even after countless times she's rearranged, reorganized, weeded out. There's a sort of material attachment, a joy that comes from owning thousands of worlds in one tiny apartment, only fingertips away from joining them.  
It's not to escape her own life, one so filled with caring and wonderful people, with the comfort of good music and hot tea and soothing company. It's to enrich it. To find what she's always been searching for, perhaps, somewhere in black print on white pages.

She searches in the stories that words make bloom in her head, but that's not the only thing. It's in the feeling of her fingers brushing across unbent spines, eager to discover. It's in feeling glossy, sleek or grainy surfaces of book covers, dented by protruding letters or smoothly protecting the contents. It's in carrying a bag with a book inside, its weight bumping against her hip when she walks, in knowing it's there, a comfort, a temporary home.

Temporary. But one that can be shared and rediscovered. It gives her something to strive for, something to grow through. Something to hold on to.

One day she hopes to tell her own story - but isn't it true that you need to have one before you can tell it? She's always had things to say, but who will want to hear them? What's worth sharing? Where is she going?

Her options are limitless, so a choice feels near impossible.

For now, she's just trying to live.

The world keeps changing, so she has to adapt - and that means no rest. No rest for the restless, the hopers, the dreamers - the reckless, the searching, the growing.

No rest for her, for she is their queen.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm searching for purpose, but I know about me. What are you searching for?


End file.
